Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Failed State

The Florida Senate, in their infinite stupidity, has come up with their idea of a budget:

The Republican majority rejected several amendments offered by Democrats to cushion $3 billion in cuts that are part of the Senate's proposed version of a nearly $66 billion state budget. Attempts to close corporate tax loopholes that could have raised hundreds of millions of extra dollars - or tap road building funds - to offset cuts to the court system or health care were resoundingly defeated.


They also propose cuts in funding for schools, community colleges, and universities, child abuse investigators, and corrections and parole officers. I'm not in the least opposed to deep cuts in the prison-industrial complex [although I'm not really expecting this to actually lead to fewer prisons] and I guess we won't need to investigate child abuse since we can just shoot them at their hangouts now, so why even bother to educate them?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Together with Amendment 1, this means layoffs in a recession of government workers and reduced services. They will have to release prisoners and close prisons, which will be filling at a reduced rate with fewer cops to arrest, and fewer prosecutors and courts to try them.

They have jumped the shark, and the pain will be great, but people don't care.

hipparchia said...

failure of imagination, i suspect, rather than people not caring.

the ultra-rich won't suffer much, so they don't care, but the rest of us, the hoi polloi, are in for a beating. unfortunately, too many people can't envision something that far outside their own experience, nor are they willing to heed the tales of their elders who have lived through tougher times, ie the great depression [which may be slated to undergo the same transformation as 'the great war' did.